Monday, February 20, 2012

Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Once Upon a Time in Anatolia | Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da (2011)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's both writing and shooting styles have started to get much stronger. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, as he has also expressed, contains the most dialogues within his filmography. I think it is at the same time his darkest film.Nuri Bilge Ceylanis a photography-based director, so he is very attentive during the process of filming. Afterall his attention in this film has already been awarded at the Cannes Film Festival by the Grand Prix.

In the film, we are dragged, without a clue about what is going on, in the middle of the night in a deserted Anatolian plateau from one side to another, following a police car, a gendarmerie jeep and a car that carries a prosecutor. There is a criminal and they altogether look for 'something' in the hills of the Anatolian steppes, something that only the criminal knows where it is. Only in the late moments of the film, we learn both what the crime is and what they have been looking for. The interesting side of the film, we're not only revealing the crime, but also lighting up the pasts of the characters, and discovering the facts in their backgrounds that even they, themselves, do not know.

Dialogues are plenty, but they are not insignificant. I think, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is well acquainted with Anatolian people. Here, he draws a picture of it through the doctor-patient, supervisor-officer, criminal-polis relations. The Anatolian people that live the silence not as an obligation, but as something ordinary, pleased with the conditions, but at the same time, grumbling about them... Trading upon request, cheating, sulking to people, regrets, gossips, flattering someone also play leading roles as well as the actors. All the characters are written with attention to represent the lives in Anatolia.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan successfully handles the suspect genre, and closes the movie with an interesting end, without alleviating the curiosity of the audience throughout this long movie. If slow movies do not bore you, you should definitely give this a try. Especially if you like Tarkovski, Çehov and Gogol; and if you want to know more about Anatolia.